Firefox 4 to Drop Some CSS Vendor Prefixes

Mozilla is busy committing changes, fixing bugs and finalizing the release of Firefox 4 beta 7. Among the smaller, but important changes in the next release is a change to some of Firefox 4′s CSS support: developers no longer need to use the -moz prefix for border-radius or box-shadow.

We’ve covered the pros and cons of using vendor prefixes in your stylesheets before and generally consider them a good thing. Coding a stack of prefixes into your CSS is not ideal, but it’s better than the alternative of using inconsistent CSS hacks or having to sniff for user agents to serve up totally different styles to different browsers.

However, it’s always important to make sure you include the actual CSS rule as well as any prefixed version since eventually that’s all that will be supported. As CSS guru Eric Meyer writes, “as time goes on and implementations become consistent, browsers will drop the prefixes,” which is exactly what Mozilla is doing for Firefox 4 beta 7.